Maryland to big ten official

on a positive note..i do look for the big ten elite episode of 2001 maryland football. that legendary orange bowl team will go down as one of the greatest big ten teams ever.

I never knew.

Do you have to have divisions to have a conference championship game?  Instead of divisions, what makes more sense to me is taking the #1 and #2 teams from the non-divisionalized (totally made up that word) conference and have them play for the championship.  Even without protected rivalries, with divisions you've got 2 non-divisional, conference games against 7 teams.  So, once every seven years in Madision or State College. 

I agree this is the only possible upside.

It is time to start bombing Brandon, Delaney, and Gene Smith with this realignment plan. It maintains the sanctity of the league's key rivalries while ensuring reasonable competitive balance. You have to believe the general feeling at the league office is going to be to keep Michigan and OSU divided in the hopes for the return championship game. The fanbases need to voice that maintaining the rivalry as an end of year thing, and as a regular elimination game for the conference title, is more important.

Penn State would complain about the above alignment, because their supposed rivalry with OSU would go out the door, but fuck them, they're going to whine about whatever happens and no one at OSU considers that a rivalry anyway. They can have their "eastern rivals." 

And the league must now go to 9 games.

My question to you about your division splits is, do you think the schools in the Northwest/East division would think it's fair that they would literally have to fly almost cross country to their away games while teams in the central division could basically drive to theirs?

I love the split and I think it's perfect, but I wonder if travel costs would prevent something like this. Just wondering your opinion.

East vs West Allignment seems to make the most sense

East: Maryland, Rutgers, Penn State, Michigan, OSU, Purdue, Indiana

West: Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Northwestern, MSU

Good competitive balance with penn state down for the near future.  UM vs MSU can have a protected crossover.

ESPN Big 10 blog also reporting it. 

Ugh.

Its probably one of the things where on a secret ballot the board vote would not have been unanimous, but the dissenters realized they were outnumbered and for the sake outward appearance they all voted the same way.  Boards often do that to avoid projecting dissension and instead projecting the notion that this is such a great idea that we all agree.

Pipkins loves him some Diggs.

... we weren't the ones that went totally stupid and went to 14 teams. 14 teams serves no purpose whatsoever.  At least if you go to 16 then you can just pretend like you're two different conferences who meet at the end of the year. At 14 you get massive unbalanced scheduling and don't get the minor incentive of really belonging to something (i.e. The B1G or whatever division you're in).

I wouldn't be surprised to see something stupid like what they did in the SEC - despite the fact that both schools are on 1 side of the conference foot print they would put them in different divisions and guarantee a cross over game for them.

If you want to go back to Penn State, then yes. If you mean adding Nebraska, well there were 3 other conferences with a conference championship game already before the Big Ten, so 3 conferences at 12.  We just wanted to make our $$$'s too. 

If you want to blame someone, blame Texas and Notre Dame.  Texas made it so no one wanted to be with them in a conference, so Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and even A&M left. And Notre Dame because their insistence on being an independant and thumbing their noses at the Big Ten kept them from being the logical 12th member which probably would have left Nebraska where it was, and none of the rest happens. Notre Dame trying to cling to independence while finding a conference that makes them still "national" rather than letting things logically fall regionally is where it all started.

Going to 12 to get a conference championship game is different then going to 14.  If you want to blame somebody for realignment look no further than Texas.

False, Colorado was the first team to leave their conference. This caused Nebraska to leave because they didn't think the big 12 was strong enough to survive. They were almost right, Texas was 36 hours away from leaving the Big 12 and taking all their minions with them to the PAC 10. The only reason Texas stayed was because the big 12 gave them the majority share in profit and permission to create the Longhorn Network. The second wave of realignment was started by Texas A&M because of non equal sharing revenue and Texas pulling in the majority of all profits.

I bet we start a Big Ten lacrosse team with just the five. With a team like Maryland who gets an at-large every year anyway and OSU and PSU who are close, you don't really need an autobid. That way everything is in place when other Big Ten teams add lacrosse.

My brother-in-law and family live the the DC-Baltimore area and are already huge B1G fans.  So, this does not bring them into the B1G fold (already there).  Rather than the pool the important consideration is the incremental number of fans added.  I see this coming from two groups: 1) casual fans that would more often tune into the B1G if it was more readily accessible and 2) fans of the existing schools.  A much smaller number than the total market.

Yeah, good job Delaney! Looks like Maryland has enough fans to justify this in terms of new BTN viewership! WHAT THE HELL